Show me a woman who does not dream
a double, heart’s twin, a sister
of the mind in whose ear she can whisper.
Marge Piercy, “The Book of Ruth and Naomi”

Ginger wants to know if she can use the body today. 
             She doesn’t look up when she asks, just flips through a book on macrophages. I don’t remember buying it. This, like Ginger, seems to have appeared out of nowhere, like the headless woman who once haunted the railroad by Keyser, or the shower of frogs that fell outside Red Hills. One day, everything was as it should be: the coffee table bearing a plastic bouquet of lavender stalks. My lone bookshelf lined with unlit candles. The white linens of my bed tucked tightly, a dusted lamp by my veneer dresser. Overnight, I found myself wading through my home like a stiff soldier at the bottom of a childhood hope chest–every once-fantasy I toyed with strewn about in nightmarish display. Ginger’s tucked tutorials on horticulture and artisanal baking between couch cushions, neon highlighter sprawled across the pages. A restored violin she decided to try her hand at after I mentioned I’d played as a child sits by the boarded-up fireplace. Scraps of wood she plans to sand and make into shelves lean against the far wall, propped up by an open toolbox. Clay beads and sheets of jewelry resin and hand-pressed flowers dot the floor like landmines. I want to stuff Ginger and all her projects into 80-gallon trash bags and thrust them into the polluted depths of the Monongahela.
          Instead, I ask. For what
          Ginger licks her thumb and hums intermittently.
          Nothing spectacular, she says.
           I don’t trust Ginger, and for good reason.
          Nobody asked you to be here! I want to shout.
          And yet, she hisses. 
          I grab a pillow from my couch and hold it close to my chest, a move I picked up from childhood when things felt a little stabby–my mother’s fingers wagging before tickling me–a boyfriend scooting closer on the couch while I scrolled through the TV guide, sweating. Outside, the Morgantown heat index hits 101. Empty cans of Busch Lite litter the sidewalk. Socks and clovers shoot up between parked cars and party-worn duplexes. An over-worn engine kicks in the pawn shop parking lot beside my house. A salamander abandons its stuck tail beneath my doorframe, and I think about how survival and self-indulgence could be sisters in the right lighting. I frown and dip my toe in a tub of open hummus on my coffee table. 
          You know where it is, I tell her.
          Ginger squeals and runs to our bedroom. She knocks a glass of wine onto my shag-white Walmart rug. This is becoming routine: her destroying things I love in the name of instinct. Once, after watching Ru Paul’s Drag Race, she bedazzled my favorite crop top, arguing that it looked better on her, anyways. She swallowed my dead grandmother’s diamond earrings on a dare while drunk in the woods. After a particularly bad argument over the body, she smashed a vase on the wall near my head.
         Sometimes, she’d said after, I feel like you’re just looking for a reason to upset me. She’d drug a glue gun along the shattered ridges of the ewer. Don’t you want us to be together?
         Yes, I’d sighed. You’re right. 
         Now, I struggle to name the feeling that radiates from behind my throat.
         Who’s gonna clean this up? I shriek.
         She pokes out from the doorway, her face a shadowed blur. She smirks. It’s the least you could do, she tells me. Don’t you think?

***

I met Ginger mid-shift at a craft brewery.  
          At the bar, an old woman folded a dollar bill in on itself until it sprouted arms, legs, a stomach. “Frog,” the woman said. She pressed the paper ridge of its spine and it jumped. I tried to make it hop into the tip jar, but it kept leaping off the granite edge.
          The woman clucked happily and pointed at her origami. “You want to hear a joke?” the woman asked. I couldn’t say no. “What,” she asked, “is the difference between a boy and girl frog?”
          I shrugged and smiled, my marionette lines lifting from strings outside myself. She nodded to the origami. She wanted me to make it jump. So I did.
           Boy,” the woman said. “Boy. Boy. Boy.”
            I could tell the woman was getting frustrated. She took the folded dollar back. I twitched while she hammered away at the frog’s paper limbs. It felt like someone was taking a ruler to my antebrachial nerve. My pollicis longus ached, began to purple and bruise.
            I noticed a thin gold thread growing around my wrists. The strand glowed. It wrapped itself around my ulna in intricate bows.
           The woman thumbed at its hind legs; the little thing leapt up and down for what felt like hours, always moving forward, always landing on its feet. The thread tightened. The silver bell on the front door of the brewery rang. Ginger floated in, tucked her hair behind her ear, and looked at me as if I were a math problem she was determined to solve. The frog finally fumbled and flipped onto its back, small arms outstretched, belly open and vulnerable.
 The woman crossed her arms and tutted proudly. “Girl.”

             The snapped thread made a clean break. My arms laid limp at my sides. My new set of hands flipped and shone. Ginger sidled up to the bar. She didn’t look at me, but I felt as if a million eyes traced my severed wrists, my rigid spine, the greasy bangs pressed against my forehead. I felt as if I had been waiting for a Ginger my whole life. I thought perhaps she had been waiting for me, too, to wish her into existence, to need her so bad that her immateriality was made material, like a soap bubble popping in reverse.
             Ginger looked at the woman and her frog dollar, shook her head.
              The joke wasn’t funny. I couldn’t bring myself to applaud. But my new hands did what needed to be done.
              They clapped and clapped and clapped.  

***

               I’d like to say Ginger wasn’t my type. But my therapy books tell me I have an avoidant attachment style, that I use distance as a tool to ignore what’s really wrong inside me. I like to imagine leaving West Virginia, getting into a liberal arts grad program, being offered a 401k and benefits. I try visualization: picture myself sitting around a bar patio with tattooed chefs, pink haired-film aficionados, coke-bottle lensed critics–all the types of people I wish I could commit myself to being. I try to imagine what’s really wrong inside me and Ginger tosses a ball of yarn across my lap.       
           You could do anything, she says. You’re a literal fig tree killer. 
           What? I ask.
           She groans. Plath, Christ.
           Without me, I sneer, you literally wouldn’t exist.
           She blinks. I, she replies calmly, am the most interesting thing about you.
            I hate it when Ginger tells it like it is.
           She drops stitch after stitch on a yellow scarf she’s knitting.
           Get a hobby, she retorts. She clicks the needles twice above her head as if sending away a bad servant and cackles. But seriously. She nods at the kitchen table she built with refurbished doors stolen from moving college student’s garbage. She points at the sun box of wilted basil and crusted tomato leaves sitting in our window. She flourishes at the painting behind her: a monochromatic portrait of me in tears she drew using blue chalk.
           When she first showed the canvas to me, I’d told her, It’s a bit literal. Still, it hangs in our living room without my blessing.
           Ginger used to be fun. She followed me everywhere I went, read all the bad poems I wrote well into the morning and left sincere comments in black ink along the margins. She brushed my hair daily and remarked how soft the curls at the base of my neck were. She mimicked rude customers while they made fools of themselves at the bar. She forced me to actually go out, to drop my hips on a dance floor under flashing silver lights, left me fettuccine noodles covered in parmesan and Advil on our side table when I’d had one drink too many. She’d coerced me into cornhole and didn’t invoke the mercy rule when I skunked her. She drug me on walks, demanded I take pictures of the rolling hills steeped in mist that surrounded us, cobblestone lanes draped in hazy lamp lights that led to artisanal ice cream shops. The racoon paw shed that sunk into bulldozed farmland, trailer parks with kiddy pools and red trikes and truck tires in the lawn. All the while, my body kept falling apart. I was losing eyes over news stories regarding red states and nuclear warfare and climate catastrophe. I shed so many waists after they were cupped by old men’s hands while picking up Kolsch glasses. I sloughed off leg after leg while Ginger drooled over Instagram posts of models doing yoga, a dozen or so ears over Ginger’s screeched insults. She picked up my loose limbs as they fell off me and tucked them into my New Yorker tote. She squeezed my second ass after a man smacked it in a club. I hadn’t wanted to go, but Ginger told me that if I didn’t, she couldn’t be held accountable for what happened to her that night. You’re gonna need this! she shouted before throwing back a shot.
           But Ginger started getting jealous when nobody reached for her at the bar, when nobody complimented her toned calves while she suntanned on our roof. This was before the body.
          If only you would let me, Ginger would cry. If only you’d let me decide for us–we could be happy. She gestured towards our house. What aren’t you getting?
         And I felt bad. I did. I was grasping at straws. I would have done anything for Ginger. It wasn’t, I kept telling her, my fault that I was the only one who could see her. When I tried to read her the Wikipedia page on symbiotic relationships, I could have sworn I heard her whisper Parasite. I noted her low-pitched whine when a movie we were dying to see conflicted with my work schedule and rented it for her to stream in my absence. When children ambled towards glass doors, I’d nudge her, knowing how much she enjoyed watching them bonk their heads. I let her tie my ankles together, notch a belt around my arms, and move me as she pleased, even if it hurt. I appreciated her. 
         I should be enough, I said.
         She sighed while tickling the inside of one of my doubled palms. I flexed my metacarpals instinctively and Ginger’s eyes rolled back. 

***

         The body looked better in pieces. My flesh glimmered like splintered chandelier crystal, like crawfish shells just touching the surface of a sunny riverbed. It was nice having them around–little backup dancers to draw attention when I blanked on the moves of day-to-day life. It was like having a deconstructed mannequin lying around–all smoothly cut, bloodless and pink. Ginger loved my body parts–she touched them like they were dying flower petals, smoothed them as if they were expensive porcelain dolls sitting on the top shelf of a glass-front hutch. She took care of the body as if it were her own, better than I’d ever taken care of myself. And I let her. It felt good to watch her attend what I’d let down.     
           I realized Ginger might be crossing a line two months after she first appeared. I was leaving the grocery store. She asked to stay in the car. You know what I want, she said. I huffed but obliged. 
          The dusk sky was orange streaked. Grackles picked at spilled bags of Cheetos while leathery men in MAGA hats waiting for their wives smoked out their rolled-down truck windows. A lamplight illuminated Ginger in the passenger seat, neck bent. As I got closer, I could tell that Ginger was sewing. She jumped when I unlocked the door. My legs and hips were stuffed by the floorboard, a trace of gold thread tethering them to one another. They didn’t look like me anymore–deflated, pulpy, wrinkled around the heels and knees like swaths of sticky nylon–but I knew from the constellation of freckles spread across the inner thighs that they were mine.
            It’s not done, she began.
            But why? I asked.
            She reached across the dash and gripped my hand. The point of her needle caught beneath my nail, and I flinched.
            Aren’t you curious? she asked.
             I tried to think, but Ginger’s breathing was so loud it felt like I was sitting in the bough of an elm in a flood-watch–like listening to the relentless, ragged rhythm of drowning. Blood from where she’d pricked me swelled into a perfect circle. I didn’t dare touch it.
             I told Ginger it looked beautiful. 

***

             I’ll admit it, I hadn’t realized I’d lost every part of myself. But by then, it hardly mattered. Ginger was happy. Like, really happy. At first, her requests were reasonable. She’d borrow the body so we could go out to eat and squeak as she made a show of tapping the paper menus with my old hands. I watched the green stain around my middle finger from a ring Ginger removed because it was “cheap” bob up then down–evidence of where I’d once been. She’d put on the body for shopping trips and spin around the department store, showing off my once-legs in plaid skirts, now shades darker from Ginger’s liberal use of self-tanner. She’d hit the bar with me and delight in confusing men I’d turned down by biting the soft of their earlobes as they ordered consolation cocktails. But after a while, she started to forget to ask for permission. She’d go out and come back with bruises and phone numbers and expensive house plants with names she couldn’t pronounce. She turned off my alarm and worked one of my bar shifts. She pierced my nipples on a whim. As she compared our unmatched breasts in the bathroom mirror later that evening, a ball formed in my throat. In case we get confused, she reassured me.
           Ginger didn’t like me watching her put on the body, though. I’d only seen her do it once, by accident. I’d been walking to the bathroom when I caught a glimpse of her through the door frame. 
           The body was slick and bright red. Its skin was raised, as if it had been left under hot water for too long, or someone had been scrubbing it with ammonia. The sutures Ginger had so delicately sewed strained. I could see the floor between the stretched, collected skin. My stomach bulged as Ginger shoved her knuckles between my obliques and ribs. I watched her flail my loose arms around as she struggled to slide into it and, for the first time, I witnessed her weep. Her body, my body, half-in, shuddered. Her spine jutted out of my skin, and I thought of the pregnant cows I passed on the way to school, heavy stomachs swaying beneath pointed joints. She fell to her knees, heaving, and pressed my unfilled hands to her face. It looked like she was rubbing her eyes with dishwashing gloves. The whole thing should have made me sick, in retrospect. I should have offered to help her. But the whole pathetic spectacle warmed me. It was as if I were stepping into a pool of water that matched my basal temperature. Ginger cracked her neck and stood. The body squelched, the sound like a wet bathing suit slapping against a plastic sack of peeled kiwis. She ducked her head into mine with such determination I couldn’t feel anything but respect. Then Ginger turned. Our mouth opened and she stumbled back. I watched how our naked thighs jiggled as she landed, how she looked up at me from behind our panicked, hollowed eyes.
            Some people, I realized, deserve everything they get.

***

            Ginger takes the body and says she’ll call me later. Hours pass. I tear my cuticles until they bleed and watch the door. I clean, organize all of Ginger’s things into neat piles, write love notes for her in my best cursive and hide them around the house for her to find when she gets back. By the time midnight rolls around, I’ve thrown up four times. I swim through the empty of my bed, wondering how I’d done it that time, if I’d pushed her to the point of no return. Monday slips into Friday. Friday into Monday again. I don’t eat. I miss all my shifts. I shed myself in full sheaths, knot my drooped arms around my waist, press my face against my sunken chest and scream. My voice echoes in the space where a heart cage should be–a rock tumbling down a lightless tunnel. I want to climb inside myself and pull Ginger out.        
             I’ll let her wear the body every day, I sob. She never has to ask again. I’m not sure who I am making a promise to. I don’t care.
            Two weeks later, I catch scuffled footsteps on my front porch. For a moment, I almost expect her to knock. She steps in, a small box in hand.
            Happy birthday, baby, she sings. She squats in front of me and places the box in my lap. I’d forgotten, lost track of days, months. My calendar ran in circles now—all manner of time collapsed into before and after Ginger.
            Open it, she tells me. She pulls at the ribbon keeping everything together. Inside, a silver bell charm rests on a thick chain. It reads I am, I am, I am. Ginger lifts the bracelet and wraps it around my wrist. I want to ask her where she’s been, what she’s been doing. I’ve never felt so far away from myself. I’m not sure what I’m more afraid of: if she could do better with my body without me, or what my body could do without her. 
            I have something fun for us planned tonight, she purrs. I nod.

***

            The man asks if he can watch.        
            Ginger slides her fingers beneath my waistband. She looks at the man, unbuttons my top and kisses my neck. I tug at the hems of my long sleeves.
            “I’ve never had sisters,” he says.
            We’re not sisters, I want to croak.
            Ginger pulls my hair away from my face and loops it around her wrist. She slowly drags me down until my jaw is parallel with the body’s collarbone. I can see her stitches.
            Ginger holds her hand between my ribcage and leads me to a wall. She grips my waist, presses herself against me. I imagine us a multi-legged beast, a wounded salamander whose tail grew back twinned and bent.
            Up, she says. I lift my arms above my head. Her motions are slow yet seamless. The air is cold. It smells like spent weed and SpaghettiOs. Ginger traces her lips between my shoulder and elbow. Her breath is warm. I shiver. She bends, runs her fingers up my skirt. When she feels the wet between my legs, she laughs. Something inside me snaps, a rubber suction cup popping against a slick glass. I grab her face and push her onto the floor, where he can’t see us. I look into Ginger’s eyes, my eyes. All I see is a tar, an inky pit. A kaleidoscope of undistinguishable skin.
            Who is who? I am not myself.
             I move for the first time in months with certainty, witless and desperate. I kiss her and wait for something to click. She stiffens and shoves me off.
            Ginger smooths her dress, her brows furrowed. I pull my knees to my chest and shake as I watch her saunter past me. The man hasn’t wasted any time; he sits naked in bed, legs spread. He wears an expression I know too well. He believes that good things come to those who good things have always come to. He thinks he is too much for Ginger, for me, for our bodies. What does he know of too muchness? Of survival? Of how the girl body is always a performance of part-ness, of halves?
           Ginger straddles the man and cranes his thin neck like a tree switch.
           Don’t just stand there, she says.
            I squat behind her and unzip her dress. I recall how she moved me and mimic her. I prod the man’s hairy legs off my thighs. I don’t want any part of him touching me. I take his hands and place them in Ginger’s hair.
          “Tell her you want her,” I command. He whispers my lines.
           I bite Ginger’s shoulders and she trembles.
          “Louder,” I tell him. “Louder.”
            I lift the bottom of Ginger’s dress. She isn’t wearing underwear. Love’s labor, I think, and push her inside him. She moans.
          “Tell her there’s no one else like her,” I say. I cough as Ginger and the man rock back and forth. I press my cheek to her wing blade and keep time.
           “Tell her,” I start, but there’s something lodged in my throat. I sputter, search my mouth for what’s stuck. The man grunts. Ginger’s voice raises. She’s singing our song. I choke. Then I find it–a long thread. I pull but can’t find the end. It keeps coming and coming. A weight surges from inside me, coaxed out from behind my spine. I wrap the thread around Ginger’s throat. I want us to be we again. Ginger gasps, Don’t–stop. The world goes black. It feels as if a thousand hands are on me, grasping, squeezing, tearing. I don’t mind.
            Not all pain is a punishment.